‘Social media vampires’ – we need YOU!

June 1 2012, 9:07 AM by Rosie Cowling

What does social media and a vampire have in common? Quite a bit, actually. Vampires are the original ‘viral’, remember.

What does a vampire have to do with the ATT? Well to start with, there’s a lot at stake (sorry), but also, we need ‘social media vampires’ to ensure that an ATT is on people’s minds far and wide in the run-up to July.

If we imagine that the first vampire reared his/her ugly head on January 1st 1600, and going on the conservative assumption that he/she has to feed on a human once a month (making the human meal a vampire, too), then by June 1602, the vampires would have exhausted their food supply as there would be no humans left on earth to feed on.

But what if we could create vampires that, rather than being hungry for blood, are hungry for an end to bloodshed? Lovely hippy vampires.

That’s where the social media bit comes in.

We’re going to need to make a lot of noise in the next month, to ensure that a watertight ATT is discussed at the UN negotiations in July. And we need YOU to tweet, post, like, blog and share everything ATT!

Let’s run with this vampire analogy. Using this logic of one bites one, two bite two, four bites four etc, then if we all shared a piece of content about the ATT, then by the first day of the negotiations, 2,147,483,648 people will be exposed to our message.

Woah. That’s almost a third of the whole world. (This is obviously on the assumption that it starts with one person and that everyone has a computer and everyone is online every day but you get the idea, it’s A LOT of people, FAST.) That’s some powerful sharing right there.

So get thirsty for an end to bloodshed. A powerful and legally-binding ATT that covers arms and the ammunition that makes guns dangerous, can put an end to the human rights abuses caused by an unregulated arms trade.

Why not make a pledge to share one piece of content every day in the run-up to the conference and make vampires out of your friends? Here’s how you can be a ‘social media vampire’:

The Control Arms campaign is a global civil society alliance that has advocated for a bulletproof Arms Trade Treaty for over a decade. Made up of over 100 charity, nonprofit, and nongovernmental groups throughout the world, Control Arms continues to strive for a world where deadly weapons are kept out of the wrong hands through a regulated arms trade.